>>>
Terrorism Coverage: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly since September 11. The
MRC has created a Web page listing all of our terrorist attack related
CyberAlert items, Media Reality Check reports, columns by MRC President L.
Brent Bozell and video clips. It’s a work in progress, put together by
the MRC’s Liz Swasey with the assistance of the MRC’s Web team, so
expect improvements and updates in the coming days. The page provides a
useful one-stop point of access to everything the MRC has produced since
the terrorist attack. To get to the page, go to the MRC home page and then
click on "Terrorism Coverage" in the blue box in the center of
the home page. <<<

"Are
the U.S. food drops on Afghanistan making matters worse? Some relief
agencies say yes." So declared Peter Jennings at the top of
Tuesday’s World News Tonight in showing that the U.S. can’t win with
some who are always looking for the dark side of any U.S. decision.
"Today some humanitarian aid workers were saying this effort is
little more than propaganda," ABC’s Dan Harris soon charged.
"And some say the U.S. is actually doing more harm than good,"
since bombing has stopped ground transport of food.

Instead of stressing how unusual it is in a
war for a nation’s military personnel to risk their lives to try to feed
indigenous people, ABC on Tuesday night and NBC on Tuesday morning
stressed the futility of the effort, how the U.S. bombing, by inhibiting
ground transportation, has blocked food distribution -- and ABC just
dismissed it all as U.S. "propaganda."

On the October 9 Today, for instance, news
reader Ann Curry complained: "The U.S. has also dropped 37,000 food
rations for Afghan refugees. But relief agencies say the rations will do
little as 7 million people are now near famine conditions."

On the same show, MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens
noticed, reporter Dana Lewis reported: "The U.S. has dropped more
than bombs, 37,000 food packs for refugees airlifted on American C-7
transports. Flown 6000 miles from Ramstein air base in Germany. But relief
agencies say the air drops will do little to feed 7 million people in near
famine conditions....Aid agencies say before this crisis they were moving
10,000 tons of food per month into Afghanistan. And now to give you some
perspective they say only about 2000 tons every week is getting, every
month is getting in here. And they're saying that these American air drops
simply will not feed the hungry refugees on the move."

Tuesday night on ABC’s World News Tonight,
following the above-quoted tease from anchor Peter Jennings, Dan Harris in
Islamabad outlined how the U.S. is supposedly making things worse. Harris
began, as transcribed by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth:
"They
call it a ‘bombs and bread’ mission. While attacking the Taliban and
Al-Qaeda, U.S. officials have reminded the public as often as possible
that they’re also attacking hunger: 37,000 individual food rations
dropped every night. Today some humanitarian aid workers were saying this
effort is little more than propaganda."
Nicolas Detorrente, Doctors Without Borders: "The main concern that we would
have with air drops is that the amounts of food delivered so far are
insufficient compared to the needs."
Harris:
"And some say the U.S. is actually doing more harm than good. The
bombing raids have some truck drivers too scared to carry food into the
country. Many of the humanitarian workers who stayed behind in Afghanistan
are now fleeing for the same reason. The attacks have significantly
hampered a large humanitarian effort, and the U.S. food drops simply
can’t compensate for that. Also, Alex Renton of Oxfam International says
while his group appreciates the U.S. food, there’s a real danger of
dropping packets in a nation riddled with land mines."
Alex Renton,
Oxfam International: "Air drop is seen as a last resort. It’s
highly expensive, it doesn’t target the needy, and it can create more
problems than it solves."
Harris:
"The Secretary of Defense today partially conceded the point."
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense: "Anyone looking at it understands
that delivering from the air is not your first choice."
Harris
concluded: "Rumsfeld says the goal is to create a safer situation on
the ground. That way the U.S. can use the $320 million it recently pledged
toward Afghanistan to deliver food via trucks. If the fighting continues,
however, all that aid could be sitting on the sidelines as winter sets
in."

I bet those Afghans who received a package
dropped from the air have more appreciation for it than these aid workers
in Pakistan who are complaining to sympathetic reporters.

Some
terrorist groups have their defenders in America. Tuesday morning on CNN
syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux, whose work once appeared regularly
in USA Today and who once had a talk show on Pacifica Radio, defended
Syria’s inclusion on the UN Security Council, despite its harboring the
Hezbollah terrorist group.

Though Hezbollah was responsible for murdering
241 U.S. Marines and took American civilians hostage, Malveaux claimed
"it’s a group that has dealt with territory and Israeli occupation
and invasion, and this is very different from the kind of terrorism that
Mr. bin Laden has imposed on the world." She maintained they
"are simply defending their land." In fact, she charged that the
U.S. is supporting terrorism by aiding Israel: "We cannot say that we
don’t like terrorism but then we support Israel’s terrorism against
Palestinians, that is a double standard that is unacceptable."

The MRC’s Rich Noyes observed Malveaux’s
far-left, anti-U.S. reasoning during an 8am EDT hour appearance by
Malveaux with Laura Ingraham as both were interviewed by CNN’s Paula
Zahn. MRC analyst Ken Shepherd went back and took down some of
Malveaux’s words.

Malveaux declared of Syria: "They were
the unanimous choice of their region, it’s a non-permanent seat. I think
that in the spirit of the cooperation that the United States is asking
from moderate Arab states, Syria belongs on the Security Council, it was a
mistake for 38 members of Congress to oppose it. I think Jewish groups are
playing hard-line when they say they don’t want them there. They are
part of the world and we have gone to them and asked them to be part of
this coalition against terrorism, how can we then turn around and say they
don’t belong on the Security Council?"
Zahn
interjected: "Well, Julianne, you may think they deserve a part on
the Security Council, but you heard what Sen. John McCain says, in a
prolonged campaign against terrorism, Syria could very well wind up being
targeted."
Malveaux:
"Paula, Syria is one of about 30 groups, 30 countries that the United
State has listed as having harbored terrorists, I think that there’s a
question about the United States definition of terrorism. The groups that
Syria has harbored, the main one is called Hezbollah, I believe. It’s a
group that has dealt with territory and Israeli occupation and invasion,
and this is very different from the kind of terrorism that Mr. bin Laden
has imposed on the world, so I think that if the United States wants to
talk about this new world cooperation, they’d better look at the
difference between hard-line terrorism and people who are simply defending
their land."

Malveaux is most notorious in conservative
circles for this hateful outburst, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, on the November 4, 1994 To the Contrary on PBS:
"The man
is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and
butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well,
that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."

"Reprehensible"? As opposed to
Malveaux who accuses the U.S. of supporting terrorism?

With
President Bush properly berating Congress for the leak at least one member
made last week, just before the war was launched, of classified
information, it’s heartening to learn that many members of the media
have acted responsibly in the past few weeks and withheld military
operational news of which they had learned.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz noted
that 17 news organizations knew on Friday, when their staffers were called
to join the military media pool, that an attack was imminent, but none
divulged the development.

Even more laudatory, more than a week before
USA Today ran a front page story about how the U.S. had Green Beret and
Navy SEAL commandos inside Afghanistan, Knight-Ridder had the story. But
out of concern for endangering the servicemen and the operation,
Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau Chief Clark Hoyt withheld the story, the
Editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press disclosed this past Sunday.

An excerpt of Kurtz’s October 9 Washington
Post story:

Seventeen news organizations knew Friday that the U.S. attack on
Afghanistan was imminent when the Pentagon summoned their reporters for
aircraft carrier duty.

There was an implicit understanding that the journalists would keep it
quiet -- and no one spilled the beans....

Douglas Jehl of the New York Times, Steve Vogel of The Washington Post,
Yarislov Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal, Bill Glauber of the
Baltimore Sun, Walter Rodgers of CNN and Jeffrey Kofman of ABC were among
those dispatched to the USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea, where
F-18 and F-14 warplanes launched bombing raids against Afghan targets
Sunday....

The more than 40 journalists summoned by the Pentagon also came from
NBC, CBS, Fox, the Associated Press, Reuters, Time, Sky News, Bahrain
television, the Times of London, Black Star and Britain's ITN. Some were
"embedded" (to use the military's term) on the USS Enterprise,
as well as a guided-missile cruiser and a guided-missile destroyer.

Media organizations, for their part, aren't satisfied. "It was a
good start to get us on board those ships," said Robin Sproul, ABC's Washington bureau chief. "But we're
very interested in getting access to U.S. troops wherever they
are."...

Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (http://www.poynter.org/medianews/)
on Monday highlighted an illuminating piece by St. Paul Pioneer Press
Editor Walter Lundy about how the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau knew
about U.S. commandos inside Afghanistan, but put the operation ahead of
the story -- only to be scooped days later by USA Today.

In that September 28 USA Today front page
story about U.S. operatives inside Afghanistan, reporter Jack Kelly,
writing from Peshawar, Pakistan, maintained: "Their arrival here two
weeks ago and subsequent movement into Afghanistan have been reported by
English- and Urdu-language newspapers here, and would not come as a
surprise to bin Laden or Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban."

An excerpt from the October 7 St. Paul Pioneer
Press column by the Knight-Ridder-owned paper’s Editor, Walter Lundy:

....Nothing is more painful for a journalist than to be scooped. It's
even more embarrassing when you had the story first but decided to hold
it.

That's what happened to our Knight Ridder Washington Bureau nine days
ago on an international exclusive about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

On Sept. 28, USA Today revealed that Green Berets and Navy SEAL teams
had been inside Afghanistan for two weeks looking for the terrorist.

The newspaper published the story, it explained, because newspapers in
Pakistan already had reported it.

The Knight Ridder Washington bureau, which serves the Pioneer Press and
31 other newspapers with a staff of 40, had also known about the ground
troops, too, for more than a week.

When the USA Today story broke, Pulitzer Prize winner Clark Hoyt, the
bureau's top editor, e-mailed his unhappy client-editors to explain why we
were scooped. Since Sept. 11, Hoyt has been coordinating Knight Ridder's
coverage of the U.S. response with eight reporters and three photographers
in seven countries, including Afghanistan. You have read many of their
exclusive reports in our paper.

Hoyt wrote, "Within days after the attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon, we confirmed to our satisfaction that some small
units of U.S. special operations forces had entered Afghanistan and were
trying to locate bin Laden. "When we sought Pentagon comment, we were
asked not to publish the story on the grounds that it could endanger the
lives of the servicemen involved and compromise any chances of success.

"(We editors) had a conversation about it, not really a very long
one, and decided not to publish.

"Based on what we knew, we believed that making (the operation)
public could have substantially increased the risk to the Americans
involved and could even have been seen as contributing to a loss of life.
We believe you (editors) probably would have reached the same
conclusion."

He's right. We are loath to keep anything from our readers but when
people's lives are at stake, what's to debate? You wait....

Contrast
Hoyt’s attitude to the one expressed by CBS’s Mike Wallace and ABC’s
Peter Jennings during a 1989 forum on PBS. The two network stars agreed
that if they were traveling with enemy troops and learned of an ambush
planned to kill U.S. soldiers they would not provide any warning.

A reprint from the April 1989 MediaWatch, a
monthly newsletter then-published by the MRC:

In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if
he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to
launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question
Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS'
Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60
Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for
the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

For the March 7 installment on battlefield ethics Ogletree set up a
theoretical war between the North Kosanese and the U.S.-supported South
Kosanese. At first Jennings responded: "If I was with a North
Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what
I could to warn the Americans."

Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself, "would
regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover."
Jennings' position bewildered Wallace: "I'm a little bit of a loss to
understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered
that story."

"Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you
can to save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of
reporting fact?" Ogletree asked. Without hesitating Wallace
responded: "No, you don't have higher duty... you're a
reporter." This convinces Jennings, who concedes, "I think he's
right too, I chickened out."

Ogletree turns to Brent Scrowcroft, now the National Security Adviser,
who argues "you're Americans first, and you're journalists
second." Wallace is mystified by the concept, wondering "what in
the world is wrong with photographing this attack by North Kosanese on
American soldiers?" Retired General William Westmoreland then points
out that "it would be repugnant to the American listening public to
see on film an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy."

A few minutes later Ogletree notes the "venomous reaction"
from George Connell, a Marine Corps Colonel. "I feel utter contempt.
Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred
yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And
they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them.
They're just journalists, they're not Americans."

Wallace and Jennings agree, "it's a fair reaction." The
discussion concludes as Connell says: "But I'll do it. And that's
what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die, going to get
a couple of journalists."

END Reprint

Let’s hope neither Wallace or Jennings are
given an opportunity to travel with any enemy troops or cells.

Diane
Sawyer couldn’t resist repeatedly applying "right wing"
ideological tags to Rush Limbuagh and his listeners in reporting on
Tuesday morning how he had lost his hearing. NBC’s Lisa Myers offered
more restraint on Today, and in the only broadcast network news story on
Limbaugh aired Tuesday night, passed a along a doctor’s theory about the
cause of Limbaugh’s ailment. (CBS’s The Early Show didn’t mention
Limbaugh on Tuesday morning, but made room for a promotional preview of
CBS’s Survivor: Africa.)

On the October 9 Good Morning America, MRC
analyst Jessica Anderson observed, Sawyer described Limbaugh as a
"conservative firebrand," noted how his "boisterous
exchange of words, ideas, barbs" have been "advancing the
conservative agenda that made him a right-wing hero" and reported
that "ditto heads" like him "for his cheerfully right-wing
views." Are there any other kind? All of Sawyer’s tags were
accurate, but they seemed to distract from the real news of his health.

Sawyer set up interview segments with Judith
Regan, Limbaugh’s book editor, and Dr. Nancy Snyderman: "Twenty-two
million people a week listen to conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh, and
as we all read recently, he signed -- are you ready for this? -- a $285
million deal, reportedly, to host his syndicated radio show. But
yesterday, Limbaugh's listeners heard a stunning announcement. He told
them that he is losing his hearing and he may never regain it. From the
king of conservative talk radio, a startling announcement."

After a Limbuagh clip, Sawyer continued:
"It was a gutsy announcement for the media megastar, Rush Limbaugh,
whose life's work and pleasure had been the boisterous exchange of words,
ideas, barbs, advancing the conservative agenda that made him a right-wing
hero.
"He
signed on for the first time when he was just 16, at a Top 40 station in
his Missouri hometown. His big break, 1988, the nationally syndicated show
that made conservative Americans, what he calls 'ditto heads,' calling in
to say, 'Ditto to that, Rush,' for his cheerfully right-wing views."

NBC’s Lisa Myers followed up a Today piece
on Limbaugh with a story for Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News. She ran this
speculation from Dr. Alan Micco of the Northwestern University Medical
School: "The most likely scenario, based on what he has told us, is
this probably represents an auto-immune hearing loss where the body’s
immune system has formed cells that are attacking the sensory cells, that
is the hair cells, in the inner ear which are responsible for sending a
signal to his brain for him to hear."

Myers wrapped up her piece: "Limbaugh
says he’s determined to keep doing his show, for which he earns more
than $30 million a year. Doctors warn his speech may get slower and
louder, but say with technology he should be able to cope."
Limbaugh,
shown via his Web site’s video, ending his show: "Even though I
can’t hear, I can still communicate. So liberals and moderates:
Beware."
Myers:
"His hearing may be gone, but Limbaugh’s legendary ego remains
intact."

Viewers then heard
anchor Tom Brokaw remark: "We wish him all the best."

Attention
those subscribing to CyberAlert via Microsoft’s Hotmail, (478 of you as
of Tuesday night). Topica.com, distributor of the CyberAlert, included
this message in their latest "Topica Insider" newsletter:

NEWS: Reaching Subscribers with Hotmail Addresses

We've received reports that some Hotmail users are not receiving mail
from some Topica lists. We've traced most of these cases to the new way
Hotmail filters "Junk Mail".

You may have noticed that when Hotmail revamped it's Web interface
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Realizing that legitimate mailing list mail was getting filtered into
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END reprint of Topica message

Not sure how much help this has been since if
your mailing list mail is being diverted to a junk mail folder and you are
not aware of it, then you aren’t reading this message.

But if you are reading this in your "junk
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